This is riveting and essential viewing ... a gentle blast of overdue common sense that covers the history of pandemics, the nature of COVID-19, and the likely social, political, economic and cultural outcomes.
Professor Davies, thank you for sharing with us your deep and clear economic history analysis. It has been years since a lecturer amazed me whilst presenting a topic. I hope I have the pleasure of personally attending one of your conferences some day.
Great talk for illustrating how many unsustainable bubbles sustaining economies needed puncturing eg people thinking that they are wealthy based on asset price inflation - Covid-19 happens to be the trigger.
Interesting, even for serious hedonists. Parochialism and nationalism a worry as I work overseas. Seems like the cultural frog is slipping back down. Locked down still in a Chinese uni, preparing for the lockdown in a lockdown as the Hubei students return today. I suggest its all eyes now on China's containment, a Herculean task so far, but too many are beginning to return to the usual habits. From my standpoint it seems an epidemic is rather less inclined to support early modern liberal philosophy. The USA, Germany and UK are already having that visibly played out, perhaps Italian culture also has had a juxtaposition between control from the centre to the social pockets of control in the periphery. It makes, could it, a three headed beast; the pull of trade and communications in our lifestyles to date, offset by regionalism and nationalism (naked without a new economic command) and reset of the ideals of liberty. Society up to the latter 20th century is famed in cellulite for its social rigours - in Covid 19 hindsight the logic behind them is less opaque and perhaps less superficially quirky.
